Look, for example, at the effect of President Trump, who held up a big Bible in Layafette Square during the summer of 2020 in the way top soldiers in the Thirty Years’ War held flags. Some pundits theorized that he would drive many away from the Evangelical label, and he did, but surveys show he brought in millions more. One in six Trump voters who did not self-identify as “Evangelical” in 2016 did so in 2020. Crunching the data a different way, a Pew Research survey found that among all white adults who participated in both the 2016 and 2020 surveys, 25 percent described themselves as Born Again or Evangelical Protestants in 2016, and 29 percent described themselves this way in 2020. That means either Trump is one of the greatest proselytizers of the past 2,000 years or the definition of “Evangelical” has changed.

After 60 years of social conflict, the latter is more likely. Religious-studies professor Stephen Haynes notes that Trump’s “evangelical supporters may have given up on Christianizing Trump; yet no one can dispute that he has succeeded in Trumpifying American Christianity.” That’s overly broad but close. Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, exulted when Trump spoke in his sanctuary on the Sunday before Christmas 2021: Congregation members “love this president and they love his policies, especially the moral and spiritual principles on which he stands.”

Well, he doesn’t stand for Christian moral and spiritual principles, but it’s precisely because Trump does not that some Evangelicals have had a third reason to support him. Some have become used to a type of Bible interpretation that hangs a political decision on a particular verse or the doings of a particular character rather than overall biblical teaching. Some World readers mentioned Samson, Jehu, or Queen Esther, but the leader many equated to Trump is Cyrus, the Persian king who made it possible for exiled Israelites to return to Jerusalem almost 26 centuries ago.

One 2016 objector wrote me this spring that in 2016 she had received the impression during prayer that Trump was a modern Cyrus, and so had her friends: The faith that “Trump = Cyrus” was and is all around her.